Fractal software for Mac

While doing a bit of cruising through deviantART I decided that I wanted to try out some fractal art. I don’t really know much about it, but I do know two more things than I did before. That is:

1. Xaos is a free (under GNU licence) fractal zoomer. At first I didn’t install it because I had no idea what that meant, but it’s pretty cool. It gives you a respresentation of different sets, starting with Mandelbrot and you can zoom in to find interesting sections. You can also change colours and apply various masks to make the image more stimulating. I believe Xaos is also available for Windows and Linux.

2. Oxidizer is a fractal flame renderer. It’s products are more similar to the things I’ve seen on dA than that of Xaos. It has a fairly simple interface that may take a small bit of reading to understand and get used to; for that I recommend this tutorial at Rampant Mac. Changing colours is much more controllable in Oxidizer than Xaos, which I like – I can’t seem to get the right colours in Xaos, but it might just take some time. Unfortunately Oxidizer seems to take an eternity to render a practical size so I don’t know if I’ll get much chance to play with it. I don’t fancy having my MacBook running at 100% cpu for hours and hours.